Role in IT decision-making process:Align Business & IT GoalsCreate IT StrategyDetermine IT NeedsManage Vendor RelationshipsEvaluate/Specify Brands or VendorsOther RoleAuthorize PurchasesNot Involved

Work Phone:

Company:

Company Size:

Industry:

Street Address

City:

Zip/postal code

State/Province:

Country:

Occasionally, we send subscribers special offers from select partners. Would you like to receive these special partner offers via e-mail?YesNo

Your registration with Eweek will include the following free email newsletter(s):News & Views

By submitting your wireless number, you agree that eWEEK, its related properties, and vendor partners providing content you view may contact you using contact center technology. Your consent is not required to view content or use site features.

By clicking on the "Register" button below, I agree that I have carefully read the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy and I agree to be legally bound by all such terms.

NASA Supercomputer Looks to Blast Off

Intel and SGI are working to improve the system at NASA's Ames Research Center.

NASA is preparing to rocket its research supercomputer into the petaflop era.

The space agency has signed an agreement with Intel and SGI to update its supercomputer at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. NASA hopes the project, dubbed "Pleiades," will produce a supercomputer capable of breaking the petaflop mark-1 quadrillion calculations per second-by 2009.

By 2012, SGI, Intel and NASA plan to increase the performance to 10 petaflops.

The news that NASA and its partners are planning to build a machine that will first break and then move past the petaflop mark has become a common refrain in the supercomputer industry within just the last year. Both Sun Microsystems and IBM have each announced plans to build new supercomputers that pass the petaflop mark. Cray, one of the world's best-known supercomputer companies, is also working toward that goal.

Further reading

It's possible the first petaflop machines could enter the Top 500 supercomputer list in June, when the organization that ranks these machines updates the list for the first time since November. IBM and its BlueGene/L system at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory currently hold the top spot with a maximum performance of 478.2 teraflops.

Right now, the NASA supercomputer at Ames, called Columbia, ranks 20th on the list, with a performance of 51.9 teraflops. The new system, with the improvements that Intel and SGI are planning, should offer 16 times more computing power than the current Columbia system.

To show how far the industry has gone since the Columbia system was first installed, the machine originally ranked second on the Top 500 when it debuted in 2004 with the same performance of 51.9 teraflops, or 51.9 trillion calculations per second. Since then, Columbia has tumbled down the list as IBM began pushing the limits with its line of BlueGene systems.

SGI first built the NASA supercomputer in 2004.

That system, which uses more than 10,000 processors, is built on Intel's Itanium architecture. The May 7 announcement from Intel and SGI did not indicate if the new system would continue to use the Itanium processors or switch to Intel's x86 processors.

With its next-generation architecture-Nehalem-Intel will introduce a technology called "QuickPath," a high-speed, chip-to-chip interconnect that should create a low-latency way to connect thousands of processors together inside supercomputers and HPC machines.

The announcement from NASA was not the only supercomputer news this week. On May 6, Dell announced it had built a new supercomputer on the campus of Purdue University. The cluster system, called "Steele," is made up of 812 PowerEdge 1950 nodes. Each node supports two, quad-core Intel Xeon processors, which should allow for a peak performance of 60 teraflops.

While not as prolific as IBM or Hewlett-Packard, Dell has 24 supercomputers listed within the Top 500, and the 60 teraflop performance of the Purdue machine would place it within the Top 20. For its part, SGI has 22 machines listed on the Top 500, including one that breaks 100 teraflops of performance.

By submitting your information, you agree that eweek.com may send you eWEEK offers via email, phone and text message, as well as email offers about other products and services that eWEEK believes may be of interest to you. eWEEK will process your information in accordance with the Quinstreet Privacy Policy.

We ran into a problem

We already have your email address on file. Please use the "Forgot your password?" link to create a password, validate your email and login.